To find out if mobile phones can monitor cardiovascular health by recording the sound of the heartbeat. 

When we think about listening to someone’s heart, we imagine a doctor pressing a stethoscope to a patient’s chest. But we all carry around microphones every day in the form of smartphones – couldn’t we use these to listen, too?

Echoes is an app which captures the sound of your heart. We know that a person’s heartbeat can give important information about their cardiac health. Echoes App was designed to be intuitive and easy to use, making the experience meditative rather than medicalised.

Our strategy is to build a research database of heart sounds and find out whether phones’ inbuilt microphones are up to the task of at-home heart health monitoring.

See our information sheet. and our accessibility statement.

We have learned that smartphones can be used by non-medical users to record heart sounds in good quality. Age may affect heart sound recording, but hardware, sex, and BMI do not alter the recording. More details in Smartphone as an electronic stethoscope: factors influencing heart sound quality